Due Process: August 2008 Archives

As the Democratic National Convention gets underway, DHS continues its campaign to terrorize immigrant communities for the administration's political ends. Adam Nossiter reports in the NY Times today:

LAUREL, Miss. -- In another large-scale workplace immigration crackdown, federal
officials raided a factory here on Monday, detaining at least 350 workers they
said were in the country illegally.

Numerous agents from Immigration
and Customs Enforcement descended on a factory belonging to Howard
Industries Inc., which manufactures electrical transformers, among other products.

As of late Monday afternoon, no criminal charges had been filed, said
Barbara Gonzalez, an agency spokeswoman, but she said that dozens of workers
had been "identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed and processed
for removal from the U.S."

The raid follows a similar large-scale immigration operation at a
meatpacking plant in Postville,
Iowa, in May when nearly 400
workers were detained. That raid was a significant escalation of the Bush
administration's enforcement practices because those detained were not simply deported,
as in previous raids, but were imprisoned for months on criminal charges of
using false documents.

The mass rapid-fire hearings after the Postville raid took place in a
temporary court facility on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa.
An interpreter was later sharply critical of the proceedings, saying the
immigrants did not understand the charges against them.

There is more from Scott Fontaine at the Tacoma News Tribune on the story of the
US citizen locked up for seven months in immigration prison and nearly
deported due to standard government circumvention of due process. Notice the
contempt with which all the key decisionmakers in the process treated
Castillo.

Still, the posture of the article and the reason this is a news item is
not that a human being was treated so poorly. It's that this happened
to a U.S. citizen. The problems that this article uncovers--the failure of the system to obtain accurate results, the inability of many migrants to navigate a complex process--exist for non-citizens as well. These problems didn't arise by accident. They have been built into the system to allow the government to imprison and deport more migrants for political gain.

And the idea that the issuance of two "A numbers" for a single individual is a bizarre glitch is just not true. It happens All. The. Time.

Rennison Castillo broke the law. He was punished for it. And he thought
he had served his time. Instead, the last day of an eight-month jail
sentence was the start of a seven-month nightmare that almost ended two
years ago with Castillo - a Lakewood resident, Army veteran and
American citizen - deported to Belize, a country he left as a child.

He spoke publicly about the incident for the first time earlier this month.

Immigration officials say his case was a rare mistake and that it
has prompted closer scrutiny of citizenship claims. But advocates say
it's the kind of mix-up that's bound to happen as the federal
government aggressively moves to deport more criminal immigrants while
limiting their access to the legal system.